Life in the Body: Finding God and Hope in Your Church Experience

Series Overview

What does your church experience feel like? Life-giving, satisfying, and growth producing? Or do you find yourself leaving church rather frustrated, disappointed or disconnected. Perhaps you desire something more within your local Body but are confused about what to do with your feelings or about how to respond to your longings. Maybe COVID has given you an excuse to stop attending and to slip out the back door.

If the latter description resonates with you, we invite you to read on about Life in the Body: Finding God and Hope in Your Church Experience. This three-part virtual series honestly explores what it feels like to be unsatisfied with church while at the same time recognizing that Jesus calls us to be an active part of his Body. Living in that tension requires discernment, openness and a commitment to love those around us.

Each session in this series includes these valuable components:

a presentation
a take-away personal project that offers a structure to process your church experience with God

An Honest Conversation About Church

Session 1

Before we can know what God is asking us to do, we need to get honest about what is truly happening--in us and in our circumstances. In our time together, we will honestly explore what it can feel like to be disconnected or frustrated by church. Acknowledging the truth gives us a place to begin dialoguing with God about what we do from here.

This session will give you a chance to recognize, name and begin to process what is happening in your church relationship.

Honoring Relationships in the Process

Session 2

There are only a few options for responding to difficult relationships. We can learn to live with what is, we can try to change the relationship, or we can choose to leave it. Within those limited options, however, we have an endless number of choices about how we treat others in the process.

However God is calling you to respond to your church relationship, we can be certain that he is calling you to honor and love those around you as you proceed.

This session explored how you can be spiritually healthy and loving in your church relationships while responding to God’s call, whether that is to stay, pursue change or leave your current situation.

Pictures of Hope in the Church

Session 3

Chronic circumstances can create discouragement and hopelessness. It is easy to become resigned about the state of the church when we feel disconnected. But Jesus is still alive and reigning in his body. The Spirit is working constantly to produce his fruit on the vines.

In this session you will hear from church leaders who are experiencing the movement of the Spirit in their church bodies--in all its glory and messiness. Their stories can cast a vision for what is possible and renew hope as you move into God’s call in your church relationship.